Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Calum's website

Calum Ryan ( @zizzfusion ) is offering a free pizza voucher prize - and although I love pizza, I'm always interested in commenting or helping on any website designs that people ask for feedback about.

The website is: http://www.zizzfusion.com/

The things that I like:
- that smokey look at the top
- easy to see fresh articles from the homepage - with comment count as bubbles.
- simple top right navigation
- a contact form on the homepage
- flickr photos
- screen shot popup - love these things.

The things I would change (if I had time - and yeah, I never do have time so I understand):
- the positioning of the popup about this competition - overlays the logo - could do with a cookie check to see it doesn't show again when refresh the homepage, but ideally slide it in, and position it so it doesn't look like an overlay banner advert.
- when viewing on 1024*768 there is no margin and slightly to wide, so the nice circle to the right is cut off and a unnecessary scroll bar appears.
- the logo is a bit flat - could do with some backdrops and colour contrast
- the logo does not appear on all pages - so I could be mistaken for looking at another website when going to the portfolio page
- portfolio page calls "articles" "tutorials"
- navigation doesn't show which page you are currently on
- Article category buttons only work for text area - expect the whole button to be clickable
- screen shot popup needs a close button at the top.
- could enhance the portrait picture on the portfolio page as it's very dark.
- description in meta tags could be stuffed with more keywords like "design, webdesign, london etc.. - not exceeding 156 characters of course.


With a few tweaks this could be a great website!